It's an environmental catch-22. California needs to meet its aggressive goals for renewable-energy production, but solar and wind farms require lots of space. The farms' land gobbling can conflict with one of Californians' most cherished values: the preservation of pristine wilderness and animal habitat. As the state gets serious about increasing its renewable-energy portfolio, there's going to be tension.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is learning that the hard way. As the author of the 1994 California Desert Protection Act (which established the wildly popular Joshua Tree National Park), she was the natural author for the California Desert Protection Act of 2010. The bill would place nearly 1 million acres of the Mojave Desert off limits for development.

It would also fund a new renewable-energy permitting office and seek to expedite permitting for renewable-energy projects on lands deemed more suitable for development, but those changes seem like small potatoes when compared to the vast amount of land that will suddenly be off limits. The Bureau of Land Management is currently evaluating about 120 solar and wind projects in the region, and a handful of those would have to be tossed out under Feinstein's bill. The developers are crying foul.

Their anger is understandable. It's no cinch to get a renewable-energy project approved at any stage of the process right now. Transmission corridors - needed to ferry the energy from farms to houses - are in short supply. The permitting process can take up to a decade. There are long lists of environmental studies to conduct, and then there's the small matter of finding available land where the neighbors won't put up a fight about their views or their property values. The cost of all of this, in money and time, can be overwhelming. It shouldn't be this hard.

Feinstein's staff told us that the affected developers will be given first right of refusal on "developable" lands, and that the bill's plan to streamline permitting will help other developers going forward. She's already tweaked the bill to make it a little more developer-friendly, and she may need to do so again. It would be helpful, for instance, if the bill contained steps to directly help developers locate viable sites.

But Feinstein's bill still trumps the developers' angst, and for a variety of reasons. For one thing, a quarter of the acreage was donated to the federal government with the expectation that it would be preserved. Washington needs to meet that responsibility.

For another thing, there's still more than enough developable desert available. California has more than 20 million acres of desert. The California Energy Commission estimates that we'll only need between 100,000 and 160,000 acres of desert to meet our goal of having 33 percent renewable energy by 2020. Of course, if California wants to be a leader in this field, we'll develop far more than that for export to other states - but even then, the well is hardly going dry.

So while Feinstein will need to make adjustments to her bill, she's still on the right track. There is a way to balance conservation and renewable energy production, and we're discovering it right now.

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